The main subcontracts have gone to: Halliburton Energy Services Group, for oil infrastructure repairs and assessments; Wild Well Controland Boots & Coots, for oil well fire suppression; California-based Electrical Instrumentation Unlimited (EIU), general contracting; Willbros Group, horizontal and directional drilling; and General Electric (GE)and Virginia Transformer, power generation.

KBR, which was awarded in March its contract for the RIO programme, has more than 50 engineers deployed in Iraq working on the scheme. The US Army Corp of Engineers, which is funding the programme, has so far pumped more than $1,450 million into the oil sector, some way short of the initial budget allocation of $7,000 million for the work.